Site Updates, etc. – April 13, 2009

If you’re wondering why there haven’t been any updates in the past week, I’ve been doing a lot of work on the back-end of the site, as well as a new design. It’s something that should have been done earlier this year, and it’s now almost finished. The layout is going to be cleaned up, along with a major overhaul of how data about the various laptops is presented.

Most of that should be rolled out later this week, and there shouldn’t be any downtime. If you notice anything weird, just refresh the page, as some older data maybe cached.

I also took the chance to switch ISPs at my house from Time Warner Cable to another broadband provider. I had been considering it for a while, and when Time Warner Cable announced their ridiculous caps/tiers, that was the final straw. The caps/tiers are so low they could only be targeting the growing market for watching video over the internet (Hulu.com, Netflix, iTunes Music Store, etc.). Even though they backed off in my area (Central Texas) as far as testing these tiers/caps (and are possibly raising them), they’ve made it clear they are going to be pushing them out at some point in the future. They even publicly admitted that they felt that if they could push them out in Austin, Texas, they could push them out anywhere. I did have a chance to attend an Austin Community Technology and Telecommunications Commission meeting where several citizens spoke out against the tiers/caps. I’ll be writing a lot more about this later this week – I’m still shocked at how ridiculously low Time Warner Cable set the average tiers/caps. In the meantime, check out StopTheCap.com – they are doing a great job of keeping up on the status of Time Warner Cable’s moves and how this is all playing out.